With over 25 years of dedicated experience as a psychologist and popular educator, Rubén Reyes Jirón is a passionate advocate for gender, diversity, and inclusion issues. His career journey encompasses multifaceted roles in designing workshops and courses, fostering inclusive organizations, advocating gender-based violence prevention in communitites, and pioneering initiatives and research for social change.
For more than two decades, Rubén played a pivotal role at Puntos de Encuentro, a feminist NGO in Nicaragua. Here, he meticulously designed and facilitated workshops exploring gender, masculinity, identities, sexualities, and violence. His work extended beyond workshops, contributing significantly to the design and implementation of campaigns geared towards preventing gender-based violence.
Most recently, Rubén’s expertise has been instrumental in shaping organizational strategies and driving capacity building across diverse sectors. His engagements have been diverse, collaborating with a spectrum of entities such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Nicaragua, where he focused on gender equity, CIASES (Centro de Investigación y Acción Educativa y Social), developing comprehensive teacher training programs targeting employability skills, and the Safe Schools project of Asociación Puntos de Encuentro. Through these endeavors, Rubén developed tools addressing power dynamics, discrimination, and frameworks for mutual support groups, fostering inclusive environments across intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, and sexual orientation.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Rubén coordinated a volunteer teams of healthcare professionals to offer remote assistance to patients unable to access health facilities. Earlier in his career, he worked as a psychologist assisting communities hit by Nicaragua’s Hurricane Mitch (1989-2000).
He worked for more than 20 years with Puntos de Encuentro, a feminist NGO in Nicaragua, designing and facilitating workshops and courses in gender and masculinity, particularly the aspects of identities, sexualities, and violence. These sessions catered to men from various backgrounds, fostering discussions on complex societal issues. This role also included collaborating on the design and the delivery of campaigns for preventing gender-based violence and combatting discrimination from sexism, racism, and beyond.
An alumnus of Iowa State University (ISU) with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Master’s in Violence and Mental Health from the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), Rubén’s academic pursuits are complemented by his research portfolio which spans critical topics, from exploring representations of masculinity and violence in intimate partner relationships to examining protective factors fostering non-violent male behaviors.